GUPTA, RADHIKA. Freedom in Captivity: Negotiations of Belonging along Kashmir’s Frontier. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 232pp ISBN:9781009201629 

Keywords: Ethnography, Politics of Belonging, Borderland, Kashmir Conflict, South Asia 

A vignette from the 2004 Bollywood film Lakshya depicts a young army major’s discovery of lifelong commitment on the distant hill of Kargil, the site of the fourth Indo-Pak war. Lakshya is not an exception in this genre. Many later films followed the same trope: conflicted personal lives, the Kargil war, and the transformation of the protagonists into guardians of sovereignty at the cost of some personal sacrifice. The hitherto unknown town of Kargil in the Himalayas, practically cut off from the rest of the world for six months, captivated the imagination of the ‘nation.’ Radhika Gupta’s Freedom in Captivity: Negotiations of Belonging along Kashmir’s Frontier is not about these stories of war and valour. Instead, it begins by exploring a simple yet pertinent question: What does life look like on the margins that have transfixed the Indian national imagination? 

Based on ethnographic research for over 14 years (2008-21), Gupta explores what freedom means to borderland Kargilis, who do not equate it with a quest for national sovereignty. She shifts “the gaze away from top-down security concerns to examine how borderland dwellers negotiate regimes of state security and their geopolitical location in everyday life” (8). The book thus goes beyond the infrastructural perspective of bricks and barracks to discover negotiations of belonging. Gupta invites us to reimagine borderlands beyond their physical territorial demarcations. In doing so, she reconstructs the border as a space of fiction where the politics of belonging is negotiated. This nuanced reading of belonging, she argues, “belie analysis framed by the dichotomies of legal-illegal, insurgent-subjugated, mobility and stasis that pervade borderland studies” (9).

The book is divided into five chapters, excluding an introduction and an epilogue. It begins with what Gupta calls “genealogies of political consciousness”—an attempt to rescue “place from the territory” (32). The narration of the history of place, she argues, is foregrounded “on people’s memories and legends in contrast to nationalist narratives in which Kargil is predominantly a strategic border” (34). This is important given the contested history of the region. Most academic research on the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir has focused on the insurgency which began in the late 1980s and the subsequent invasive presence of the military. Freedom in Captivity broadens the scope of literature by foregrounding the “emergent consciousness of regional Kargili identity in relation to Baltistan, Buddhist Ladakh and the Kashmir Valley” (34).  Contextualising Kargili Shias beyond the Kashmir conflict and within the larger trans-Himalayan ecumene adds a much-needed layer to conflict studies and trans-Himalayan literature. From a historical perspective, it brings forth the muzzled political voices from Gilgit, Baltistan and Kargil in academic literature and post-colonial nationalistic imagination. Although Gupta acknowledges that it is impossible to state today how “Kargilis might have envisioned their future in 1947 as memories of p